Some embodiments described herein relate generally to switch fabric systems, and, in particular, to a distributed control plane of a switch fabric system.
Some known networking systems include a centralized control plane that can manage resources of the networking system. For example, the centralized control plane can maintain a database associated with the physical location of the resources (e.g., chassis identifier, chassis shelf identifier). Additionally, the centralized control plane can manage forwarding-state information associated with the resources. Such a centralized control plane, however, can become extremely large and unmanageable when a large number of resources are included within the networking system.
Other known networking systems include a distributed control plane. Such known distributed control planes can be implemented at various nodes within the networking system. In some known networking systems, forwarding-state information is manually configured at each node implementing a portion of the control plane. Such known networking systems, however, are not suitable for large scale networking systems having a large number of nodes implementing a portion of the control plane. For example, an operator would need to manually enter each update and/or change to the topology of such a networking system at each node implementing a portion of the control plane. This can become cumbersome when frequent updates are made to a large scale networking system.
Accordingly, a need exists for apparatus and methods to efficiently manage, transport and/or share forwarding-state information within a distributed control plane.